East Meets Wham!, And Another Great Wall Comes Down

April 28, 1985|By Al Patrick.

When Wham! member Andrew Ridgeley surveyed China`s most historic monument, the Great Wall, and flippantly joked, ``I can`t imagine why they built it, I can`t see who would want to invade this place,`` he got it very wrong.

The West is keen to invade the huge, untapped market that is China, and the People`s Republic--thanks to a shift in philosophy that after 30 years is endorsing capitalism with a hesitant embrace--wants to be as helpful as it can. It is no fluke that the harbinger of this emerging cultural/commercial exchange should be a pop-rock group, practitioners of one of the West`s more lucrative and highly visible businesses.

And so it was recently that Wham!, a duo from north London who two years ago were standing in Britain`s long welfare line, found themselves playing to 12,000 bemused Chinese at their first concert in the Peking People`s Gymnasium.

If George Michael, 21, and Andrew Ridgeley, 22, didn`t know just what to expect when they stepped on stage, it was an experience they shared with their audience.

The Chinese audience had never seen a rock show and simply didn`t know how to react. They didn`t know that when a teen-idol band like Wham! hit the stage, the correct pop protocol was screaming, swooning and clapping madly.

When lead singer Michael, determined to squeeze out some reaction from the crowd, told them, ``We hope you are going to enjoy what we do for you this evening. We hope you all join in and clap your hands.`` He didn`t realize he couldn`t break down thousands of years of tradition with a 60-minute show.

A few hours later, Michael admitted: ``It was the hardest performance I`ve ever given in my life. I couldn`t believe how quiet the crowd was at first.

``I didn`t realize that they weren`t clapping because they thought we were begging for applause. And I didn`t realize that they weren`t good at clapping in time to Western music because their sense of rhythm is so different to ours.``

But the reaction in Peking, though polite and quiet by Western standards, doesn`t mean the concert, and a subsequent effort in Canton, weren`t successes, only that the Chinese didn`t know what to make of them. Wan Ho, a physics post-graduate student at Peking University, summed it up:

``Western pop music is very disturbing. It is very different from the smoothness of Chinese music. But there is an excitement about it.

``This music is very open and romantic. I think it will make Chinese people open and romantic, too.``

It is this potential ``romanticism`` (read that ``sexy``), that the Chinese authorities fear most.

And that is why Wham! approached their Peking show softly, very softly.

``We were chosen to tour China because we were such nice boys,`` Michael said. ``When the Chinese officials saw us perform in Tokyo to judge whether we could play there we did a very wholesome act. They liked it.``

However even the mild sexuality that Wham! gives to Western teenagers had to be eradicated from the Chinese shows. Michael admitted he had been asked to tone down his act (and to reduce the volume of the show by half so as to not scare the Chinese audience used to more delicate music).

The most notable excision was the scrapping of the sensual ``Careless Whisper`` video with its bedroom scenes. ``Young people in China aren`t even encouraged to have idols or sexy pin-ups,`` Michael said. ``We were asked to edit our videos to remove the kissing and cuddling scenes.``

Even so, the effect of the show--including Michael`s bare-chested stage moves--must have been like peeling a prawn with a sledgehammer.

When Wham! wasn`t performing, they seemed to be either eating or filming a movie they are making of their ``Chinese conquest,`` directed by Lindsay Anderson.

The banquets were many. They were given as a show of friendship, and attended by top Chinese hierarchy. Speeches that punctuated the meals, which often included such delicacies as hundred-year-old eggs, were about East-West entente--cordial and polite, but at times unconvincing.

Even George Michael sounded like a politician when he told the rank of stiff government personnel, ``We hope our performance in China will represent not only a musical event but hopefully a cultural introduction between young China and young people in the rest of the world.``

Yet despite the polite applause after every speech, there were still dissenting voices about Wham! and the West. Mainly these came from the older Communist politicians, who still say Western influences will bring decadence to the purity of China. They call the influence ``spiritual pollution`` and say they fear it will destroy their culture.

And that is why the Chinese government chose such a clean-cut group as Wham!, whose well-scrubbed songs contain no discordant notes of politics, protest or perversion. As Zhou Rhunkie, from the All China Youth Federation, the organization that had invited Wham! to China said, ``Wham!`s music is very healthy. It is a good introduction to Western life for our Chinese people.``